She thought about it. She had lived in Castine her whole life. "They'd ask how you know. And you'd say you've been watching him. And then you're the weird new kid who's been watching the quarterback."
"And then nothing happens," Imre said, "except now he's careful around me, and so is everyone else."
"But you're telling me."
"You came to me," he said. "And you're not new. And you love him." He said it simply, not as a question, the way you'd point out the weather. "People listen to that."
They had met four times after that. Twice behind the science wing. Once at the public library on Main, at a table in the back by the microfiche machines, where Imre had brought his brother's old notebook, the one with the sideline-test scores in a twelve-year-old's handwriting, and Noor had read it with her hand over her mouth. And once, on Sunday night, in her car in the Kroger lot, because it was the only place either of them could think of that was open late and private and not anybody's house, and because Bastian had agreed to talk to her.
Bastian did not like phone calls. Imre had warned her. He did not like the way voices sounded compressed, or the way the screen glowed, and he got tired fast. But he had said he would do ten minutes, and so they had sat in the Corolla under the broken light at the far end of the lot with Imre's phone propped on the dashboard, and Bastian Yusuf's face had appeared on it, a broad, tired, gentle face with the same quiet eyes as his brother, in a dim room with a blanket over the window.
He had talked for forty minutes. He had not gotten tired. Imre said afterward, his voice strange, that he had not heard his brother talk that long in a year.
He had told Noor what it was like to lie on the sideline test. He had told her about practicing in the mirror. He had told her that the worst part, worse than the headaches, worse than the light, was the anger, the way it had come up in him out of nowhere in the months before he quit, so that he had shoved his own mother once in the kitchen over nothing, over a question about laundry, and then stood there shaking with no idea why he had done it. "It's not him," Bastian said, looking at Noor through the little screen. "If your guy starts getting mean. I'm not saying it's not his fault. But it's not all him. Okay? Remember that. If he gets mean, it might be the thing that's talking."